


Andromeda

by dragonlisette



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M, Sci-Fi, pbb 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-12-03 20:51:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11540217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonlisette/pseuds/dragonlisette
Summary: The year is 2204, and Dan Howell, unfulfilled on planet Earth, wants to find freedom elsewhere. That elsewhere will be Andromeda, a space colony far out of the solar system. On the fifteen-month voyage there, he meets Phil, starry-eyed and looking for life’s great adventure.





	Andromeda

**Author's Note:**

> [originally posted on tumblr.](http://cityofphanchester.tumblr.com/post/131787480390/andromeda-part-i)
> 
> original author's note: This may be the only PBB fic that required extensive use of a TI-84 graphing calculator. It may also be the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I really hope you enjoy it. Unbounded thanks to Kar (yourlieinaphil) for their immense kindness, wise words, and stunning art; thanks also to Annabelle (yessisterdaniel) for ideas that impacted the whole story, even beyond part one. I’m also so grateful to Iona (parttimestoryteller) for volunteering her incredible talents and ideas at the last minute.
> 
> 2017 author's note: originally planned as a three-part story, will live happily ever after like this. ART BY KAR [@NONETHELESTER](https://twitter.com/nonethelester).

 

* * *

 

It was raining again.

Warm, bitter with pollution, washing down the filthy streets of London’s underworld. It soaked through Dan’s shoes as he huddled under a ragged awning, rifling through a faded wallet for the right keycard. The oily water clung to his skin and the hems of his jeans. Even the alienesque melodies – thin, otherworldly, defining the twenty-third century – were subdued as they drifted from doorways.

Dan’s fingers caught on the right keycard and he let himself in, past the peeling, decade-old poster for the Andromeda Colony still taped up on the holocinema’s window.  _A NEW HOME FOR HUMANITY_ , it read. _See the Andromeda Colony Applications Board at your local administration building._  The diverse, tool-holding, navy-blue-jumpsuited adventurers gazing dramatically out from the bottom of the advertisement were partially covered by an equally-old poster for a steamy alien romance film.

The lobby was empty, except for the battered ticket ‘droid perched on the counter, making ungodly whirring noises to itself and choking on a tangle of paper. Dan was late, but it hardly mattered. He was the only one here mornings. Besides the ‘droid.

“Morning.” Dan told it, yanking the crumpled tickets out of its printer. It went silent, blinking glowing yellow eyes at him in robotic thanks.

“Welcome to the East Street Holocinema.” it told him, voice crackling. Dan put his employee code into the back of its neck to shut it up before it started listing showing times. Pause. “Hello, employee #3, ‘Dan’.”

“Morning.” He ducked into the office, opening the circuit breaker and starting to flip lights on. “D’you hear about the Martian colony?” he called back out, the cinema humming to life beneath his fingertips.

“Today at ten, twelve, fifteen, and nineteen-hundred, we are showing  _Sergeant Jack 3: An Io Adventure_.”

“The new bubble is going to be a suburb, practically, they’re planning row houses and gardens; they’re putting greenhouses and filtration systems and generators and everything directly in the houses.”

“At twenty-two-thirty, we are showing  _Cherchez La Femme: Alien Woman_.”

“D’you wanna go see Mars before you get melted down?”

Silence. Dan slammed the panel shut and re-entered the lobby.

“I want to.”

He patted the ‘droid on the top of its boxy self, trying to imagine what it would reply if it had more of an AI. Trying to think of what to tell its empty face while he waited for the end of another empty, interminable day.

Thunder crescendoed outside, rain crashing onto the roof, and then the bell was jangling and someone small and dripping-wet was ducking inside, stamping wet boots and peeling a sweatshirt hood away from their face. They took no notice of Dan, dark eyes barely flickering his direction.

“Good morning,” he tried. The Sergeant Jack series attracted all types, but he wouldn’t have expected this one. For one thing, despite their fragile stature, they looked like they could send tall, muscular Jack sprawling on his starship floor with a single glance.

They turned. “Good morning.”

“Really raining, then.” Dan said, plastering on his customer-service smile. “The film’s starting in fifteen minutes or so.”

“Oh. Thank you. I’m just staying out of the storm.” Their voice was clear, confident; Dan couldn’t identify the accent, but it definitely wasn’t London.

“Oh.”

“Do you mind if I stay here for a minute?” They didn’t wait for an answer, eyes roaming the small, dingy lobby with its glossy posters – starship after starship, new, faraway horizon after new, faraway horizon, alien love interest after alien love interest. They smiled suddenly. “That’s not what Europa looks like, really.”

Dan’s heart jumped into his throat, the accent suddenly recognizable with the throaty vowels of the Water Colony. A creature from another world. “You’re from Europa?”

A nod, smooth and slow. Their eyes were stormy.

“What’s it like there? How different is it from here?”

They took too long to answer, and Dan wanted to come out from behind the counter and touch them, this alien creature living a life so different and so much better than his.

“It’s different. Fewer people in the whole colony than live in your city. No windows, no sky, and you’re always afraid of the whole station collapsing in under the water pressure. It’s always too crowded and the air’s never fresh. I miss it, though.”

“Why’d you leave?”

They shrugged. “You get tired of the same old places. I’m going to Andromeda in six months.”

“Really?” The reply was too fast, but Dan couldn’t stop himself. Andromeda, faraway Mecca and impossible dream. He’d never known anyone who was really going there. Never known anyone who said  _you get tired of the same old places_  and then actually left.

Another nod. The stranger shifted awkwardly on their feet, water dripping slow and steady off their clothes. Before he exactly knew what he was doing, Dan was offering the purring heater in the office, and a soggy customer was perched in his boss’s chair.

“I’m Em,” they said, stripping off their hoodie and draping it over the doorknob. They seemed to be warming up to Dan with the heater. “You’re…?”

“Dan. What are you going to do in Andromeda?”

“Probably fix tech at first. I don’t know how, but there aren’t many options and I’ve signed up to take a class on the ship. It takes fifteen months to get there, about.”

“I know.”

Em had thrown curly dark hair over their face, so Dan couldn’t see their expression, but it sounded surprised. “Okay. Sorry, I don’t expect to find Andromeda enthusiasts in underworld London. Too much commitment. Easier to move the family to Mars.”

“I know. It’s not like I’m going to go there, it’s just that it opened up shop when I was, like, eleven, and it was my thing for a while. I know too much about it.”

“Why aren’t you going to go there?” They tossed their hair back, face flushed. The rain was still slamming against the windows outside.

“Too much commitment.” Dan felt suddenly self-conscious. He’d fallen away from his Andromeda dream so long ago that he felt unworthy talking with a true adventurer.

“If you’re happy here. Personally, I can’t breathe here, but that’s just me.” They shrugged. “Fifteen months isn’t that long, comparatively, and it doesn’t cost anything if you take the indentured servitude option.”

Dan was silent.

“What? It’s not like they could sustain a colony just with the triple-digit millionaires. Sign away a few years of your life to manual labor or fixing ‘droids, and you’re set.” Their eyes were fixed on him, like they knew exactly what Dan was. Restless but coward. Dreaming but not acting on it.

“I do have a life here,” he told them, attempting a light laugh. He wasn’t altogether sure that he believed it, but it was better than being pinned under that gunpoint stare. It took a moment, but Em looked away.

“Okay. Sorry. It’s just that the concept’s amazing to me, you know? Traveling across the galaxy. I guess I try and convert everyone I meet. I think it’s stopped raining.”

It hadn’t, but Dan accepted the excuse to get Em out of the office. The film had already started. He could hear the explosions from the empty theatre, and the temptation to leave the building, leave the film running and never come back, was so strong that his breath stopped in his throat. Em was already heading for the door with a quick nod. He let them go out, small and insignificant in the dark street with the frowning, glittering dancers and the alienesque playing.

The room was too quiet and too familiar. It felt like home.

He hated that it felt like home.

* * *

“Hey.”

The phone was cold against his cheek and Alex was taking too long to reply.

“Hi, what’s up?”

“Nothing, I just thought I’d call.” There was a pause, which Dan felt compelled to fill. “Sorry I haven’t talked to you in ages, things have been. You know. Hectic and stuff.”

“You’re fine.” He laughed a little. “Just sat here revising, I shouldn’t have taken Japanese and German at the same time.”

“Maybe not.”

“You could come home, you know. Help me with the Japanese or something.” He paused, exhaled. “At least stop with this calling-me-sometimes-but never-anyone-else thing. They’re worried about you.”

“I’m okay.”

“I know. Still working at that holo?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you should leave. Do something different. Go somewhere different.”

“Remember when I used to want to go to Andromeda?” He wouldn’t have brought it up, but Em was still in his head. The temptation to leave, run away to the stars and never come back, was still pounding in his ears.

“That seems a little drastic.” He could almost hear Alex sitting up and paying attention, and he’d be in his old bedroom at home with the pale-blue walls and Mum and Dad would be downstairs drinking tea in their old armchairs, and Dan was out on the street, head down against the wind, past rubbish skating down the concrete, and an anguished scream rang out from behind some curtained window, and Earth wasn’t worth it.

“Yeah. It’s not like I’m going to.”

He passed a dark, empty building, and another one of those  _A NEW HOME FOR HUMANITY_ posters was peeling down off the window. The poster’s sky taunted, crystalline and sharp against London’s smog. The starscrapers to the north towered over the filthy underworld, looming and glassy, and Dan was so small and so stuck to the ground, and his head was swimming with the tininess and dirtiness of his life.

“I do remember it, though.” Alex said through the phone, crackly, with the air of someone keeping a conversation going for conversation’s sake, because he was sixteen and his only brother called once in a month if he was lucky. “All those books and posters and models. You had a countdown going on your screen, waiting until you turned eighteen and you could sign up to leave.”

“I think I’m going to leave.”

Silence. He’d said it without thinking, but now that the words were out he thought they were true.

“That seems a little drastic.” His voice was forced.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but Alex, I’ve always wanted to leave, and there was this person who talked to me today, and they’re going, and it’s not that hard, and – Alex, Earth is so small and dirty and I’m going nowhere and I’ve always wanted to leave and I just want a fresh start.”

“Dan – you just said – that’s not a decision you can make in five seconds. Don’t – ”

He didn’t finish. “Yeah.” Dan said eventually. “Okay. I’ll think about it. Good luck on your Japanese. Bye.”

“I – okay, goodbye.”

Dan hung up and started running for home, to the tiny, dirty flat he shared with a sometime emotions dealer, because his computer was at home, and he’d lied, he wasn’t going to think about it anymore. He’d been thinking about it for ten years. He was going to leave the orbit of this too-familiar sun as soon as he could possibly get the chance.

* * *

The emotions dealer was mixing Happy in the kitchen when Dan got home, eyes bright with manufactured joy.

“Hey,” Dan said from the doorway, because he figured communication was an important aspect of a symbiotic roommate relationship.

“Evening.” the emotions dealer said, pulling a cardboard case of opaque bottles and blue rubber stoppers out of a cupboard. “You look unhappy. But also excited.” It was the most disconcerting side effect of the emotions dealer’s potions that he could read moods, completely, like Dan was made of glass.

“I think I’m going to ship out.” Dan said, tracing a finger down the rough grain of the doorframe. He wondered if the emotions dealer would find a new roommate, or if he’d find somewhere else. Whom these walls would house once he was gone. The fumes were reaching him from the stovetop, making his insides fizz with an odd chemical excitement.

“Mars?” the emotions dealer asked, seemingly unconcerned. Dan tried to breathe a little less.

“I was thinking more Andromeda.”

The emotions dealer was decanting sunny yellow Happy into the first bottle. He tipped it in Dan’s direction, a makeshift toast. “Congratulations, Dan. That’s far away. You’re making a decision in your life.”

Dan winced. Laughed. “Thanks. I’d cheers you back but I haven’t got anything and I don’t know your name today.”

“I haven’t decided yet.” The emotions dealer sealed the first Happy, slid it down the countertop, gestured at it with a gloved hand. “That one’s – that Happy is someone realizing for the first time that their friends love them.” He considered. “And my name’s Athanasius today.”

“Cheers, then, Athanasius.”

A nod in return, and the conversation was over. Dan moved off, to his closet of a bedroom with the waterstained ceiling and the mattress on the floor. The window looking out over the alley. The room was as bare as he could manage, as if he’d always known, as if he’d always been waiting to leave.

The government-sponsored site for the Andromeda colony included a friendly checklist of requirements, full of applications and waiting periods, departments and processes so long they had to be initialized. Dan read through it. Once. Twice, and then he hit print and tacked it to his wall, the only thing breaking up the white plaster.

* * *

Getting a visa was easy. A few forms, a clean record, fifty pounds, and he was free to travel to, live in, and temporarily work in any extrasolar colony of the world Earth. It was harder to get an actual place in the colony. The flat fee for the transportation cost had enough zeros on it to make the bottom drop out of Dan’s stomach.

“And can anyone pay that?” he asked the hollow-eyed official in the waiting room as he checked the second option.  _Live-work financial aid._

“I’ve never seen anyone do it.” they said, collecting up the hard copies.

* * *

Live-work financial aid didn’t mean much more than indentured servitude and another week of sending forms to the Andromeda Colony Applications Board. He used up all his postal credits and most of the emotions dealer’s and then he ended up on the phone to Alex begging for his.

“So you’ve decided?” Alex said, slow, and again Dan couldn’t help but see him. The streetlight in his window. Messy hair, messy room, playing Dan’s old hologames. So normal and so average. So much abandonment in his voice.

“Yeah.” Dan said. Sighed it. “Yeah, Alex, I have.”

An abrupt, humorless laugh crackled down the line. “Fuck, Dan, you’ll never see any of us again.”

“Even if I’m lucky, I won’t be leaving for another six months.”

“ _Dan_. Actually fuck you, you’re so fucking selfish.”

The words rang with the quaver of a sixteen-year-old boy trying not to cry. Dan was silent, a sick feeling in his chest. “I know.”

“Do you actually? Jesus Christ. Take my post credits, I’m not going to use them anyway, but for Christ’s sake come home and see me before you leave the  _planet_.”

“I will, I’m sorry – ”

“Shut up and let me hang up on you, you bastard, and if you don’t come home for Christmas at least I will actually literally disown you.”

He hung up, leaving Dan with a distinctly sour taste in his mouth and throat. He could take Alex with him, but that didn’t seem fair, because Alex had opportunities here and he didn’t and he wanted to leave and Alex didn’t. He stood alone in his tiny room amid the roar of underworld-London traffic in stagnating guilt for long enough to feel his heart pounding in his ears, and then his phone gently shook in his hand and he had a notification. _Postal Credit Total: 24._

If there was an award for the worst older brother in the cosmos, he probably deserved it. The latest set of application forms were already set aside, and he crammed them into an envelope to post in the morning.

* * *

It was two weeks later that he ended up in a sterile office being told that his credentials weren’t stellar, like he didn’t know that, and that dropping out of uni for law wasn’t much more of a qualification than spending about two years working in a cinema, like he didn’t know that either.

“We’re looking for engineers, scientists, doctors, you know.” a straight-backed probably-PhD. told him, not unkindly. “Something valuable to the colony that you can pay your way with.”

“I know.” Dan told them, trying to muster as much maturity as he could. He just wanted the universe. Was that too much to ask? He breathed out and managed the words he’d taken directly from the official Andromeda applications site. “I don’t have many qualifications, but I’m looking for a fresh start. Don’t you have options for me?”

The official smiled benevolently and pityingly down at him, like they knew exactly what Dan was quoting. “We do. You’d have to be willing to start from the bottom, but the labor program has helped many ordinary people like yourself find fresh starts in Andromeda.”

Dan looked down at the glossy hardwood floor. Scuffed his foot along it. Real wood floors were so rare, so wasteful. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen one before. In Andromeda there would be no real wood floors, but in Andromeda he could understand where his life was headed. “I’d like to.”

The official shuffled some papers, the benevolent smile unwavering. “I think it’s a good choice, Mr. Howell. I’d be doing it myself if I were your age. It’s just a year of training on the ship, three years of work, and then you’ll be ready to start a new life and just as qualified as anyone else on the colony. Would you like a brochure?”

Dan accepted the brochure, which was shiny and advertised beaming young people wielding manual spanners. While Dan wasn’t sure he’d ever touched a tool before, he’d also read anything that he could find about the program, and it was the best and only option he had. Dan at twenty-one didn’t have freedom, and Dan at twenty-two wouldn’t have freedom, but Dan at twenty-six would, and Dan at twenty-six would probably have a better idea of what he wanted to do with his life than Dan at twenty-one did.

He set down the brochure, and picked up a pen, and signed on the line.

* * *

 

And then suddenly everything was happening. Suddenly things fell into place, and he had a place in the colony and a place on a ship called Liberty, and he was going to be free from this world and in space. He got huge files of more information than he could ever read about the ship and the colony. He got more huge files about what would be expected of him as a part of the live-work financial aid program. He got thin hardcopies of documents that he read over and over until the onionskin was soft and tearing under his fingertips.

* * *

He went home for Christmas and let Alex stare at him from across the room for hours. They were only alone together once, in the hallway coming back from waving a great-aunt goodbye, and Dan found himself pinned to the wallpaper with more strength then he remembered Alex having.

“You have to tell Mum.” His voice was dry and fast, and Dan was frozen under swimming brown eyes.

“I know.”

“She asked if you were going to come home for your birthday and you said yes, you would; you’re leaving in March and your birthday’s in June.”

“I’ll come home for yours, then – ”

Alex released him. “Jesus, do you care about anybody except yourself?”

Dan wanted to say yes, but cousins were coming around the corner and Alex had already turned away. He cared about people, he told himself, it was just that mostly he cared about freedom. Clear skies and colored stars and openness instead of dead ends and dirty Underground stations.

He went back and sat with his gran and let her talk about her childhood, her eyes sharp as ever, fixed on Dan like he was twelve and lying about a lost coat or a detention slip. She never accused him of hiding anything. It hurt far more than if she had.

* * *

The emotions dealer moved out in February, taking with them the bottles and the fumes and the midnight trysts with lost souls finding happiness in artificial endorphins, and then Dan was alone. He made Alex promise not to tell Mum and Dad, and then he stopped talking to him too. He turned in resignation papers at the holocinema. Didn’t renew the lease. There was an exhilaration hidden in the pain of cutting ties, in the fact that in less than a month he’d be free of Earth entirely and forever. Every time he did something, it was the last time, and sometimes he stopped breathing because he couldn’t believe any of it.

* * *

And then it was the fourteenth of March.

The building at the end of the gravel path reared up in front of him in a too-modern spire of glass and steel.  _Cape George VII_ , read the sign above the ranks of glass doors in a powerful sans serif. Too-bright flowerbeds blossomed around the entrance. He’d probably miss flowers.

He’d miss flowers.

There was a roar from far behind the building: a shuttle ascending. It rose up, arcing into the sky, and birds were exploding out away from it, unheard under the noise of the engine. Fire and smoke billowed out in its wake. Dan wanted to applaud, but at some point launches had become too commonplace to be special. Already crews would be preparing the next shuttle, even as the rocket boosters jettisoned high above and began the long, slow descent.

“Excuse me,” someone said from behind him, and Dan realized he’d stopped walking. He ducked aside obligingly to make room for three people, all crew cuts and military uniforms. Their collars said ensigns, their faces said young. They didn’t even look Dan’s way as they passed him, caught up in their own dramas.  _Running-for-the-Cape_ , the half-archaic slang for the way they clutched the shoulder straps of their duffels and pressed forward like the glass and the steel of Cape George VII was the only thing in their future. The most femme of the three, purple hair and hennaed hands, was talking fast, all Academy words: _logistics, Olympia-class, superluminal hyperdrive_. Navy brats. Dan almost wished he was one of them.

If he was a Navy brat, he told himself, setting off again, his life would be a series of commands and no freedom, but the bitter London air was thin and cold and unrecycled on his skin and he’d miss it. Those three up ahead would return to breathe it again, and he wouldn’t.

His ID card cut into his hand, and then he was through the stiles with a beep of recognition, and then 3341060450 was inside Cape George VII, just one mixed into the crowd, millions of digits of ID numbers scrambled together in a single lobby. For a technically military facility, the steel-and-glass building took overstimulation to the maximum. Flashing signs covered the walls, telling him about luxury vacations to Io he could take and nanomoisturizers he could buy. The floor swam dizzyingly with people, like that picture of the Wall Street floor printed in every history book, and massive digital clocks flashed on each wall.

16:04:27 || 14 / 3 / 2204

A knot of people pushed past him, and Dan let the slipstream carry him to a queue. The whole lobby was crammed, people pressing in on him on all sides with their saccharine perfumes and world of accents. Most of them were speaking some form of English, but he caught Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean – phrases and syllables clunking through the part of his brain that remembered all his primary-school language courses.  _Sí, Нет. はい, 아니_. The line crawled, and Dan kept flashing nervous glances at the nearest clock. He couldn’t be late. Not this time.

“ID?” A clipped voice, deliberately bland, and the businesslike face behind the computer terminal was looking through him in the impassive, disengaged way of someone who’d been looking at faces for hours and would look at them for hours more. Dan took a hurried step forward and slid his well-worn card under the grille, giving up his permanently-startled nineteen-year-old face, eyes wide and fringe brushed out of the way for the camera. A startlingly-pale hand took it, checked image to face with very minimal interest. “Name?”

“Daniel Howell.”

“ID number?”

“3341060450.” The numbers slid smoothly off his tongue, well-oiled with the grease of long use. He’d stumbled over his name many times before, but he doubted he’d ever stumble over his ID number.

There was a rattled-off quiz of questions, bleak questions and quick answers batted back and forth like a well-practiced tennis match. All those hard copies, organized, stapled, agonized over, were flicked through with peripheral interest and handed back, and then he was cleared, a strange feeling in his stomach, and pointed through a barrier and up an endless pneumatic lift, all those floors flickering past, to floor seven, Departures. A long hallway, the great well of the lobby dropping away behind him and the terminal before him. It was still crowded up here, forcing him to the end of the roped-off queue.

He couldn’t see much from where he was, but he could see security officers, and he desperately tried to ignore the interrogations going on in front of him, the metal detection and the searches. On some level, he understood the fine-tooth comb and the desperate fear of letting anything slip through, but he felt unfairly naked. At their mercy. He just wanted freedom, just wanted to be far away from crowded humanity, and they held him in the palm of their hands. Security giveth, and security taketh away. What fucking right did they have?

A young figure, crying, was escorted out, a ramrod-straight official brushing Dan’s side. Maybe this was where it ended. Right here. With a wrongly-answered question and a security escort out of the building. He pushed the fear down and twisted the hard copies in his hands.

And then his queue slid forward, and suddenly he could see everything. The hatches at the back of the building were already open, a tiny finger of cold March air reaching Dan’s face through the hundreds of people and the searing heat of the engines starting to fire. Shuttle 941, smooth and glossy-white in the sunlight, rested calmly on its scaffolding. The first few people, first-class passengers, were already boarding.

The officer that eventually faced him across barely twenty centimeters of empty air was young and smiling. Military personnel, short hair and bright eyes; stern eyebrows and razor-sharp lips. The barrage of questions, professional, white-gloved hands smoothing over Dan’s pockets, was brief and forgiving, but Dan’s organs compressed and burned with rage over the injustice. He was going to the stars. He was not subordinate to a young, sharp-smiling official who had somehow fallen into the power to paw through his bags. He just wanted freedom.

He was moved directly from security to the shuttle with less than twenty minutes before takeoff. He’d always hated the confinement of shuttles, but now he couldn’t feel anything but a throbbing, sickening excitement, like the first time he’d skipped school and taken the train into town with his friends, like sneaking out after dark. His knees were weak as he edged down the aisle and into his middle seat, between a businessperson and a small, nervous rating, and his hands shook badly as he adjusted the shock harness and slipped the oxygen mask onto his face.

“First time?” the businessperson asked kindly, leaning back to tighten their own harness. With the mask on, Dan could only shake his head. Not the first time. Just the last. He wished he was by the window, to press his nose to the glass and watch the ground slip away, but instead he settled for the glimpse of green and blue and gray he had, listening to the sterile voice in the mask list safety precautions.

“Thanks for flying Cape.” the voice finished, with sugary friendliness. “Takeoff will occur in approximately ten minutes.” Elevator music replaced the voice, a tinkling piano sonata that was probably supposed to be calming. Dan tuned it out. Watched the stewards make their way down the aisle, tightening harnesses and double-checking oxygen masks like roller coaster attendants too acquainted with mortality. A steward reached their row, deft fingers tugged and prodded, a recycled smile was flashed their way, and all was quiet again. Dan could hear the rating’s breathing in his ear, quick and nervous, amplified by the mask, and then the lights dimmed like the cinema and flashed bright green.

“Shuttle nine-four-one, cleared for takeoff,” came a crackling voice, and Dan’s hands were clenched around the armrests, knuckles pressing through the skin. There was a roar, and he was pressed back into the seat and it was hard to breathe, and he barely remembered to look out the window, a last streak of green and blue and gray, and the seconds and minutes were long and aching. His insides felt watery. The piano sonata was still playing. Long, painful minutes of silence. The digital clock above the door kept ticking forward.

Two minutes.

Three.

Five, ten, twenty.

And then the disembodied voice was back, calm and in control – “We will be docking at Terran Space Station 02 momentarily” – and the shuttle was slowing and there was less pressure on his ribcage. They were pulling to some kind of stop, and he caught a glimpse of another shuttle out the window, a flash of gray in the star-pinpricked blackness, and they must have reached the queue outside the station. He could feel the lack of gravity, now that the shuttle’s velocity wasn’t pressing him inexorably back. His hair floating, his body light, held down only by the straps binding him to the seat. The rating was still breathing too fast in his ear, but the businessperson had taken out a computer tablet and was reading a news report. Dan loosened his grip on the armrests a little, feeling the ache in his fingers from the extended abuse. Minutes passed, and more minutes, and Dan wanted to scream, and then they were sliding into the docking bay, steel and paint and equipment slipping into view through the window, and spacesuited workers harnessed to their stations and manning the equipment. The shuttle slowed, stopped, and Dan guessed the hatch doors behind them had closed because the air vents were opening and he caught the deafening hiss of air roaring into the bay.

“The doors will be opening momentarily.” the voice informed them. “It is safe to remove harnesses and oxygen masks. Welcome to Terran Space Station 02.”

A flurry of activity and a rising tide of voices, and Dan was fumbling to get free. Eventually the businessperson had to help him unfasten the harness. “I’m used to it,” they said, a touch pretentiously. “Up and down and down and up, twice a week if I’m lucky, more if I’m not.”

People were moving toward the doors, climbing down a ladder onto the scaffolding-like platforms. Even with people exiting through multiple doors, it was fast-paced, crowded, confused. Dan’s hands were slippery with sweat and he clung to the rungs with all his strength. The wide shuttle bay was metallic, brightly lit, and disorienting; the workers didn’t look over at the new arrivals, already preparing to receive the next shuttle.

The platform moved them through large airlocks into a receiving room where steel-backed clerks behind computer terminals entered ID number after ID number into the system, the database absorbing information and juggling logistics with the ease of fast processing. Civishippers, deck five; milishippers, deck six; station engineers, eight; business, nine; navy, ten and eleven. The lines swam, slid away through doors. It took barely minutes for Dan to reach the front of the queue.

“Daniel Howell,” he told the remarkably steady and comforting eyes of the crewcutted and burly clerk. “Daniel Howell, 3341060450.” He watched the clerk’s chubby fingers dance on the keys. Every finger was streaked with paler bands, where rings had crowded and blocked the sunlight.

“Deck five, hall three.” The clerk’s voice was warm, sunny, tinted with India, and Dan’s stomach clenched with homesickness. All those holidays to the subcontinent. He hadn’t even noticed which one would be the last one. “You’re shipping out on Liberty?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re really leaving, then?”

“Yeah.”

Hard copies spilled into expert hands, and Dan watched the ballet of paper-jogging and stapling. “Deck five, hall three, door to your left and take the lift. Ever been to Naught-Two before?”

Dan nodded without elaboration, because the queue was long behind him and the hard copies were warm in his hands.

“Right then.” A smile like summer rain on warm ground, and Dan had moved on. Door to the left and into the huge pneumatic lift, crammed in with so many other people. It was glassed in, and he could see the emergency stairs spiraling around it. God, he hoped he’d never have to use the emergency stairs. They were empty now, metal mesh all tangled with wires and emergency lights. spiraling up and up all the way to deck fourteen. He wished there were windows. He wished he could look down and see the Earth spread out beneath him, clouds and opens and great stretches of land. All the places he’d ever been, far too small and far away to ever find.

Deck five, hall three was a quarantine hall. Everyone there still wore civilian clothes and held their Earth possessions, potential infection from anywhere in the world at every turn. It was small, far too small, maybe thirty feet wide and forty deep, and it was crammed full of bunks, three levels high, metal, bolted to the floor, only enough room between them to edge through sideways. Thin mattresses, thin gray blankets, thin pillows. The room smelled of metal, sharp antiseptic, frightened human. It was filled with the nervous hum of unsure voices, pale-voiced civishippers who didn’t seem to know if they ought to be talking. Hundreds of people had arrived that day – hundreds of people arrived every day – and all the quarantine halls were always crammed full. 

No one had made the place a home: They were all new refugees, sitting hunched over on their bunks and hugging bags or blankets or children. Babies cried, filling their corners with sound, and Dan didn’t blame them.

A little queue had formed before a bulkhead near the door, and the beep of ID cards at the scanner was mysteriously comforting, the same little sound file here as at the corner store at home. When he reached the bulkhead himself, he was greeted with a graph of the room.  _Select a bunk_. Most of them were already tinted red, claimed, and the free ones were mostly third-level, far away from the doors. Dan hesitated, uncertain – none of the options were good options. Every bunk too much resembled a coffin.

“Pardon, mate, hurry up.” someone said behind him, and Dan selected one against the wall mostly at random. The environment was already violently claustrophobic, and the breath on the back of his neck wasn’t helping.  _Confirm? Confirm_. It blinked red on the screen, and Dan edged away, counting along the bunks and trying with limited success to stare at people without making eye contact.

“Excuse me,” a round, motherly type said at the fourth bunk, reaching out to touch his arm. Dan supposed he took a little too long to reply, because they retracted the arm, quickly scanning his face. “Sorry, English?”

“Yeah, yeah, English, sorry.”

“I don’t suppose – they took all my tablets at security, my son gets awful headaches with the pressure changes – please – ”

“I don’t have anything.” Dan said, trying to exude sympathetic maturity, but the son in question, six or eight or something, was whimpering and wriggling in the shadows like a tortured mealworm, a litany of  _mummy, mummy, mummy_  drilling into Dan’s temples, and it was so hot and close in here, and it was getting hard to breathe. How many more days? Two? Three? He couldn’t do it. He wanted open space and stars in the window and nothing holding him back. Not this.

Crawling onto the top bunk with his heavy bag felt far too much like climbing into a coffin – a small coffin, with hot, thick air rising to the ceiling. This wasn’t freedom; it was hell, but he could do it. He had to do it. For Andromeda.

* * *

He was woken at five in the morning, space station-time, by his own internal clock. He ached from the cramped space and the thin mattress. It was eerily quiet. Just breathing. A whole room full of nothing but breathing. He wondered if Em was up here somewhere. That rainy day in the cinema was dim, an old film, half-remembered. Maybe it hadn’t even happened.

The mess hall was just as shiny and antiseptic-smelling as the bunk hall, just far too bright where the latter had been far too dark. The tables, ten or so of them, cramped together, were bolted to the floor, made from the same metal as the bunks and reflecting light back everywhere. The room was small, a tiny ‘droid kitchen-and-storage in the back, with minimal counter space providing pans of food – washed-out like an overexposed photo by the violent lighting. Dan observed the fairly pathetic selection of breakfast. Reconstituted oatmeal and powdered eggs, freeze-dried fruit, chemically-engineered jam on stale toast.  A little percolator of coffee, humming and bubbling happily to itself.

The door swung open and a silvery ‘droid rolled out, its vaguely humanoid appearance doing nothing to make it look more friendly. “Good morning,” it said blankly, its eye sockets swivelling to register Dan, and slid its spatulate forearm under the mostly-empty oatmeal dish, rolling back through the door.

“Morning,” Dan told its retreating form. There were two more ‘droids in the kitchen, one washing dishes with steaming jets of water, the other running four or five machines at once, connected to them with bright-blue cables. There was a human, too, in the navy jumpsuit of civilian employees, whipping the pan from the third ‘droid’s arm, sliding it onto the pile next to the washing ‘droid, pulling another dish of oatmeal from one of the corded ‘droid’s machines, slipping it back onto the third ‘droid’s spatula arm to be carried back out. It rolled back through the doors, eye sensors picking up Dan again.

“Good morning.”

Dan tried to notice a change in tone, because these military-grade space ‘droids were supposed to have the closest thing to AI yet achieved, but there wasn’t any difference. Dan was just another human-shaped figure outside the door, and the ‘droid would have no way to know whether it was the same person or a new one.

“Morning.”

“Enjoy your – ” microscopic pause to access the time “ – breakfast.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” It rolled away.

The coffee was decent, and Dan babied it, rubbing cold fingers along the hot cup. He was already restless again, a deep hunger and a twitch in his fingers telling him to jump on board Liberty and never look back.

“Dan? I didn’t think you’d do it.”

He jumped, turned, and it was Em, a spirit out of the distant past, just the same as he remembered. They were followed by a tall, sharp figure, pale where Em was dark.

“I guess I did.” Dan said, a strangely potent relief seeping into him. Even a halfway-familiar face was unbelievably comforting. “I’m here now. No going back.”

“This is Zoya,” Em said, sitting down with their back to the table and touching the other’s arm. Both of them wore the dark navy of the space station, as did most of the people trickling into the hall. “Sometimes she’s my life companion and sometimes she beats me at things and I disown her.”

“Hello.” Dan was suddenly aching for another human to make this trip with, but he pushed it aside. Freedom was more important than companionship.

“Good morning, Dan. Did you just arrive here?” Her voice was honey under the heavy Russian accent.

“Yesterday.” Dan said. “I want to be gone already.”

Em laughed at that. “We’ve been here three days. Don’t talk to me about boredom.”

“No – not that. It’s just that this is worse than London for being cramped in and useless. I can’t wait to be on the ship and gone.”

“I guess you decided to agree with me that no one can breathe in underworld London.”

Dan nodded, trying to remember what either of them had said six months before. “I mean, I wasn’t doing anything with my life – maybe on Andromeda – ”

“That’s what everyone says.” Zoya said, interrupting so sweetly that he couldn’t be irritated. “That’s what everyone says. Maybe on Andromeda.”

And Dan wondered whether Alex had told anyone yet, and thought about how he’d never see their reactions. He didn’t bother finishing the sentence, which would have been something like  _maybe on Andromeda I’ll be fulfilled_ , or  _maybe on Andromeda I’ll be happy_ , or  _maybe on Andromeda I’ll find freedom_. He just let those three words stand for it all.

Maybe on Andromeda.

* * *

The second day meant waking up far too early in the morning and spending hours in the hospital being decontaminated. By the end of it all, Dan’s skin was red raw with chemical cleansing and his arms and thighs stung and ached with preventative injections. Everything he’d brought had been gone through and either cleaned or destroyed, and he had been provided with standard uniform. Thick, sturdy jacket and trousers with too many pockets in a stunning shade of dark navy, clunky black boots with thick soles, a watch that could probably survive an apocalypse. He was allowed to keep most of his clothes, and he took some sort of halfhearted pride in wearing his old band shirts hidden under the Orwellian sameness of the clothes.

He was moved from hall three to hall seven, where everyone wore dark navy. Here people talked more, were more at ease. They shared stories and plans, names and histories. They’d moved in, practically: The standard-issue boots were everywhere, shoved in the tiny clearance between the lowest bunk and the floor, shoved to the end of beds, laces tied together and looped over the ladders. Here people welcomed new arrivals as if to a home instead of to a brief resting place.

“I put together hovers at home,” an intimidatingly tall but smiling person told Dan. He and his wife had introduced themselves at length, voices catching on the names of adult children left at home. Their accents were Mandarin Chinese, but the husband prided himself in speaking five languages. “In Andromeda, I will build whole cities.”

“That’s amazing,” Dan said, because the man’s eyes were resting benevolently on him.

“And what will you do?”

“I don’t know yet.” Dan said, and tried not to look like it bothered him.

* * *

It was late morning, day three, and Dan stood with three thousand people in a system of hallways and departures rooms meant to get people off the station as quickly as possible. Liberty loomed in the windows: large, bulky, cylindrical, the windows small pinpricks of light from this far away. He could see most of it, with his face pressed to the freezing glass, but it was too big to comprehend. It was docked in three or four places to the space station, hugging up alongside it. It was smaller than the station, and yet it seemed so much larger. Dan’s breath was quickening, his stomach churning. This was the ship that would carry him across the cosmos.

It was odd to stand in a hallway with hundreds of other people that looked exactly the same. It wasn’t even the identical uniforms or bags, although that helped. It was the tucked-in, nervous posture, it was the quick glimpses at the windows as if the already-gone-forever Earth would be spinning there. It was the families that stayed tightly together as if the only things left they knew would disappear too.

In the departures room, long later, when Dan’s legs had already gone almost numb from the standing, a tall, hooked-nose official snatched ID card, visa, authorizations, and tickets from Dan’s hands to study them with pale, whirring eyes. It took a moment for Dan to see the inhuman flashes of light at the back of their retinas. Scanners installed at the front of the brain, wirelessly transmitting Dan’s information into the computer system and receiving confirmation back.

“Cleared to proceed,” they said, voice leaden, and Dan’s papers were shoved back into his hands. The airlock doors breathed open in front of him, a pneumatic sigh, and then he was back in  a shuttle bay on a clanging metal scaffold, looking down at the gaping emptiness beneath him, a few smaller spacecrafts docked far below. Liberty, almost half the size of its mother, floated to the side, umbilical passageways reaching down to connect the two. It had floated here for the better part of two years as its construction was finished. Now it would be borne out into the universe.

A scrawny ensign was waiting to perform usher duty. “ID number?”

“3341060450.” Dan’s heart was in his throat, but his voice was clear. The ensign’s fingers blurred copying the digits into a computer tablet.

“Deck six, starboard, yes? Take the third hatchway, it’ll take you to deck four-starboard, you can take the lift from there. Welcome to Liberty.”

There was already a line at the third hatchway, people clutching onto the handrails and edging into the round passageway. It seemed frail. A thin skin separating inside from outside, life from death, and Dan felt suddenly ill, following close on the tall, broad figure in front of him. Here was the forever-line. He could never touch anything on the other side again.

Somehow he managed to walk forward, letting the sickening feeling of zero-G surround him and fill him. His knuckles were grinding on the handrails, but then he could feel Liberty’s artificial gravity beginning its pull, and he was stumbling through the other hatchway into a wide corridor, picture windows sprawling on the outer wall and glassed-in lifts filling the inner. In the window, the umbilical passageways swayed between the space station and the ship. Earth, smooth, glassy marble, filled the horizon behind the station.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

Dan glanced over his shoulder, unsure if he was being addressed. Unsurprisingly, somehow, it was Em. Crooked smile, navy-blue uniform, bag slung over a shoulder. He could only nod in return.

“You’re not up on deck seven, are you?” they asked, leaning forward to press their face against the window. They winced at the cold and drew back.

“Six.” Dan said, clutching at the strap of his duffel. “So many people, y’know? It feels like secondary school all over again.”

“I guess you don’t know your roommate. I’ve just got Zoechka, ‘s easy for me.”

“I’ve got to go meet someone called Philip. I hope – God, I don’t know what I hope. Not a murderer. That’s what I’m hoping. Low standards.”

“Good luck, then.” And they exchanged a nod and Em was gone and Dan was alone. He stood by the window for a moment, watching the identical forms swarm into the lifts, hundreds of them, all the same, and then he followed the crowd.

The lift led him to a plaza, rectangular and white, another wide window overlooking the space station and the blue-white world. There were dozens of minimalist white chairs and tables bolted down to the floor and dozens of people already sitting in them, staring out. Dan stood for a moment outside the lift and caught a glimpse of Europe swimming past. Wondered for the hundredth time if Alex had told anyone yet. If the emotions dealer had forgotten him. If his gran would miss him.

Down at the other end of the plaza, double doors opened onto a gray dining hall; beside that was a subtle hallway to shared toilets. Evenly spaced down the wall opposite the window, there were twenty-five white doors, neatly labeled with the cabin’s number. People were milling around, identical down to the fear in their eyes – students and twenty-somethings and Navy brats assigned to Andromeda, all young and traveling alone, greeting each other with proffered hands and shaky smiles. Some of the doors were already opened wide, people washing in and out of the rooms. Everyone there was unattached, and everyone there was scared, and that gave Dan enough confidence to step away from the lift and search for cabin a14, counting down the numbers.

The door was still closed and locked when he’d reached it: Lester, Philip Michael must be yet to board. Dan scanned his ID – the door opened – and the room was small, but Dan loved the  _idea_ of it. It was aesthetically pleasing, to Dan’s undernourished eye; it reeked of freedom. There were two bunks set into opposite walls, a metal locker under each. A table in the corner and two chairs, a light in the ceiling, a schedule board flashing blank on the wall. A few meager square feet of empty floor space. Dan pushed the door mostly closed and flipped the light on, and then deliberated for a few moments, running a hand over the rough blankets. His bag slipped down off his shoulder into the crook of his arm, and then the door was opening before he could fix it.

 

The new arrival looked surprised to see someone else in the room, but beamed a smile anyway, all sparkly eyes and ruffled hair, gripping the strap of his bag. “Hi. I’m Phil.”

“Dan.” He hauled his bag back up. Phil looked tired, but so did everyone else: It had been a series of stressful and sleepless nights for Dan, and that couldn’t be unique.

“I’m glad you don’t look like a serial killer or smell like onions.” Phil crossed to the right-hand bunk, dropped their bag, and started unlacing those heavy black uniform boots. Dan was suddenly caught with the desire to see what they’d looked like on Earth. The choppy fringe probably meant they’d listened to solely space-rock and worn dark colors. Their accent was Northern, but at least they spoke English. “Here’s to fifteen months in space.”

“Christ.” Dan said, a headrush of giddy excitement and fear washing backwards over him. “Yeah.” He had to sit down, run a hand through his hair. Phil’s socks were mismatched: galaxy print and polka dot. “Where’re you from, then?”

“Lancashire. You?”

“London, now. Strange to breathe air without worrying about carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Phil laughed at that, a sweet laugh. “What are you doing here, besides avoiding the carbon monoxide?”

“Getting away.” Dan felt the urge to stand, so he did, leaning on the doorframe for a second to catch a glimpse of the space station and the planet spinning outside the window. “Being free, and all that. What about you?”

“Wanted to see the world.” They didn’t seem to catch the irony of the statement. “Y’know? See everything and experience it all.”

“Yeah.”

They were interrupted by a person outside the door, tall, dark, smiling welcomingly. “Hello, A-fourteen. I’m Jai, I’m from A-seventeen, we’re all meeting each other out here.”

Dan let Phil do the introducing, and Phil seemed happy to do it, especially once Jai had lured them outside, where a ripple of voices filled the space. Mostly English, but dashed with Arabic and Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi. Fifty people, and so many voices. Already people were gluing together, exchanging names and places of origin, all of them hopeful, all of them nervously flailing in a sea of people, trying to make friends. Dan was brutally reminded again of the first day of secondary school. By the time they made it back to a14, all awkward laughter, they’d talked to at least as many wide-eyed young civil engineers as there were stars in the sky .

“That’s the most engineers I’ve ever seen in one place.” Dan said, filling up the silence that settled in as the door swung shut.

“I completely agree. No, are you just here – like, I’m gonna be doing whatever they tell me to when I get there – I went to university for making holofilms, which isn’t any good here. Which is a shame because I just graduated and I’m really good but I’m going to be carrying boxes.”

Dan nodded, fiddling with the hem of his jacket. “I went to uni for law, but then I dropped out, so I’m doing the same. I thought more people would be doing that, but I guess we’ll find them.”

“Well, if we’ve been abandoned with the engineers for fifteen months, do you want to tell me about yourself?” Phil asked, and they sounded genuinely curious.

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

“Like, my name’s Dan and I’m twenty-one and I’m male and I’m way too tall?”

“A good start.” Phil said, and their eyes sparkled and their face crinkled up when they smiled. “I’m Phil, twenty- _two_ and male and way too tall. But I meant more something I couldn’t read off some official document. Like your favorite color or something.”

“I don’t have one.”

“This is going to be a long fifteen months if you don’t even have a favorite color, Dan.”

“Fine – I’ve… I’ve wanted to go to Andromeda since I was eleven. I can’t even believe this is happening.” He stopped. Tried to laugh at himself. “Sorry, it’s just cool. I didn’t like being on Earth much.”

“I liked being on Earth.” Phil said, and it was less a rebuttal than interest. “I think I’ll like it here too, though.”

* * *

The hours passed slowly. There was a chronometer on the wall broadcasting the molasses minutes, and Dan spent his time staring out at the glimmering station and running his fingers over the smooth metal of the cabin and listening to Phil’s lighthearted stories of a life in the North.

And then the ship shuddered, and Dan glanced over at Phil, quick. 20:00. An announcement was crackling over the intercom. Dan was on his feet and opening the door before he even realized he was doing it, lightheaded, short of breath, and it seemed the whole of deck 6 was out in the plaza, gripping at the picture window with white-knuckled fingers. Slowly, slowly, but surely, the space station was starting to slip away, and Earth with it, and Dan couldn’t quite breathe because everything he’d ever known was falling away behind that window and there was a cloudy, colorful joy filling up his chest.

“Phil, Phil,” he said, clutching at a handful of navy-blue uniform jacket. “Phil, we’re leaving.”

Phil was laughing, joyous, wide-eyed in the face of the cosmos, and everything was so strange and giddy, and then TSS-02 was gone, and Earth was gone, both just receding specks behind them, out of their view.

“We’re gone.” Phil said. Dan let go of his sleeve, but he couldn’t stop smiling, pushing his hair back out of his eyes.

“It’s  _gone_.” He could barely force more air into his lungs, they were so full of emotion already. He was choking on it. “Earth’s  _gone_.”

Phil was smiling so widely that he barely looked like the person Dan had been talking to mere minutes ago. “Are you all right?”

“I’m perfect, I’m perfect.”

Someone next door cried for hours. When the second announcement came at 23:00 –  _we have just passed through the orbit of Mars_  – they stumbled out with the rest of deck six to stare out at the blank black sky, thin and small and fragile, tearstained, hand over mouth. Phil went and talked to them, leaving Dan to clutch the windowsill for much longer than the rest of the deck, watching the sky for he knew not what. It was muddled black, like watercolor, like old coffee, and strewn across with more stars than he could comprehend.

“She’s called Drace.” Phil said from behind him, already a familiar voice.

“Why’s she crying?” Dan didn’t look at him, too swallowed up in the window. He thought Phil might have to physically drag him away. He met Phil’s eyes for a moment in the reflection.

“Didn’t really say. I can’t blame her, though. She can’t be more than eighteen.”

“Is she going to cry for fifteen months?”

Phil shrugged in the reflection. “Probably not. If I’d known you for more than a couple hours, I’d tell you to have a little more sympathy.”

“I accept the criticism.” Dan said moodily. The plaza had emptied. “My brother called me  _so fucking selfish_  or something when he found out I was leaving. Look at the sky, though. I mean. Can you blame me for wanting to leave? Why isn’t everyone out here looking?”

“Drace’s scared.”

It seemed beside the point, but Dan let it slide. “Five hours until Jupiter.” The display board by the window was blinking the time down, a slowly rotating hologram of the red giant. It was far away. They wouldn’t see it. But to pass it. To be part of the privileged few thousands of people that were reaching out, falling out into the universe. “Do you ever think about how small you are? Like, on the grand scale? I love it. Like. What you do doesn’t matter.”

It wasn’t precisely the truth. He was terrified of not mattering. But the point was that Phil was looking at him like he felt sorry for him and his selfishness, and Dan didn’t want to be looked at like that. He belonged out here, far more than he’d ever belonged on Earth, and if it took selfishness beyond measure to have this view, that was a price he was willing to pay.

“No.” Phil said, and his tone was less cheerful than his words. “I don’t. Just gets you bogged down. Look how  _pretty_ it is, though.”

* * *

Barely anyone slept that first night. They passed Jupiter a little before four in the morning, and then Dan accepted a few broken hours. It was freezing cold, tossing and turning on the hard bed under the thin blankets. Drace cried all night. Regardless, the eight-hundred morning alarm chimed repeatedly and exactly on schedule.

“Where are we supposed to acquire breakfast?” Phil asked almost as soon as Dan opened his eyes. He was blinking at Dan like a confused owl, and he looked pathetic enough that Dan had to get up and find his glasses from the floor.

“I’m guessing the dining hall.” Dan said, pretending that the curls falling in his eyes didn’t bother him. He’d brought his flatiron, but the room’s single plug included a screen reading out their remaining electricity ration, and it was little enough that he guessed straight hair was an exotic luxury here. Phil’s hair was everywhere, too, and curlier than Dan had expected.

“You’re a smart roommate.” Phil told him, fumbling with the glasses. “Sorry, I’ll be more functional once I’ve acquired whatever crap artificial coffee is here.”

Dan accepted the compliment with a nod, but he couldn’t help but think of the emotions dealer, who still felt like his roommate sometimes, despite the fact that they’d barely talked when they had lived together. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted a closer relationship with Phil than he’d had with the emotions dealer, despite the fact that Phil was a good storyteller and he had a sweet laugh and pretty eyes. They were sharing a single tiny space in an enclosed space with fifty others who were all fighting for the same resources, the same electricity rations and artificial coffee, and he felt claustrophobic just thinking about it.

Outside, the screen showed a hologram of Saturn. Jai was watching it pensively from outside a17, a mug clutched just below their chin. Dan approached them, curious, but Phil was already there, drawn to the caffeine.

“Coffee?” he asked, polite, and was directed away.

“Good morning, Dan.” Jai told him, still thoughtful. “I’m trying to reconcile myself to the fact that we’ll be seeing Saturn in four hours.”

Dan’s breath caught in his throat. “We’ll be  _seeing_ it?”

Jai nodded. “I agree. I just found out this morning. Isn’t that – ”

He stopped talking, and Dan had to agree.

* * *

At 12:07, Saturn filled the sky.

It took eight seconds to pass. Four long, frozen seconds of it growing to their right, this strange, sandy apparition, smooth, icy, with streaks of rings, and four more of it sliding across their field of vision and disappearing again to the left. It didn’t look real. There wasn’t enough time for Dan to comprehend the vastness of its existence before it had passed the window and was gone.

“I had no idea.” Phil murmured behind him. Dan didn’t have the strength to reply. His brain had short-circuited.

Someone a few people away was saying something, quickly, choppily, so his few semesters of romance languages could barely keep up. “ _je – je pense que – je vais aller voir –_  ”

They shoved through the people, out of the crush, and towards the lifts, and barely had their finger connected with the button then was a tall, clean-cut figure following after, broad-shouldered and unfairly-jawlined.

“Stop.”

The first, small and confused, turned. “ _Par_ – excuse me, sir – ”

“You can’t leave this deck right now, please.”

“Why not?” They were backing down; probably, like Dan, they’d noticed the studs dotting the uniform collar. Military personnel, shipping out to Andromeda with the rest of the them to run the ship and keep order. Another one was slinking out of the crowd, and Dan could hardly breathe. They’d been on the ship for only a few hours, and the military were already seeping out of the woodworks.

“Can I see your ID?”

The cornered mouse fumbled in their uniform pocket and handed it over.

“As part of the class-two live-work program, you should know that you don’t have the clearance to wander. Please return to your cabin.”

* * *

Dan had sworn that he’d read all the small print, but there it was, at the bottom of page twenty-eight.

“It’s just that they see us as indentured servants.” he said, furious in the mid-afternoon in a place where mid-afternoon was barely a concept. The board in the corner had lit up with their first schedules. Work training started the next Tuesday, with five hours of lessons on deck eight, and continued on with little glowing circles in the corner of nearly every day that month. They were to get their ration credits at ten-hundred on the next Saturday. An ordered life, run by some logistics department up on deck twenty.

“We are indentured servants.” Phil said. He was sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, organizing and unpacking all his belongings into the locker. He’d sorted through it at least twice, and there wasn’t much there. The spare uniform, a few other clothes, a tiny stuffed lion, a few worn-out pictures peeking from between the pages of an old spiral-bound notebook.

“I’d just like a little respect – just because I didn’t go to the fucking space-navy academy – why can’t I walk around?”

“Did you want to walk around?”

Dan sighed loudly at that and let himself fall backwards onto his bunk. “I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about it yet until that poor person got ripped apart. But I would have thought about it. It’s a big ship and deck-six-starboard is pretty small.”

“You’re a funny one.”

Dan looked over at him, but Phil was smiling. “Fine. Did you want to do the wandering thing?”

“Maybe, yeah. It’s a bit shit to be locked up. But it’s not like we’re really locked up – have you seen that window?”

“That’s what they want you to think, though, isn’t it?” Dan stopped when he saw the look of alarm on Phil’s face. It was too early in their roommate relationship for the anarchy.

* * *

 

It was past made-up midnight, maybe nearing one on the second day, when Dan got up from the hard, cold, uncomfortable bed and found himself out by the picture window again, like he was addicted to it. It was just that outside that window, everything was clear-cut and black and white and simple. There was nothing but freedom. And inside? Nothing was simple, and he’d only been here one full day, and there were fifteen months left.

And then, of course, he thought about Alex. By now, everything must be exposed. By now, Alex must have been forced to reveal everything he’d known. He’d be blamed for the fact that no one had gotten to say goodbye to Dan. So fucking selfish. He’d been right.

“What are you doing out here?”

It was the roommate.

“Looking.”

“Why?”

There was a long pause.

“It’s just so goddamn lonely out here,” Dan said, slow. The thought had come to him  _fastfastfast_ , and he’d almost just burst out with it, but the black was pressing tight against the window and his eyes were glued to it and the words had come out slower and more thoughtful than he’d really intended them to. He wasn’t sure he’d even intended to say them.

“We’ve barely left.” Phil said, and if there had been curtains Dan was sure that he would have closed them. As it was, he took Dan by the elbow and steered him back toward a14’s open door. Dan was reminded of the way he’d gone off to talk to Drace. Did he just gravitate towards the weakest people in the room?

“I know, and there are loads of people, don’t start on that. It doesn’t make sense.”

Phil closed the door and turned on the light. Sat him down on the floor between the two bunks and tossed his own blanket over him. Sat down opposite. “It’s the witching hour, Dan, things don’t have to make sense.”

 

Dan allowed him a smile, twisting the artificial cotton of the blanket beneath his fingers. He could feel the words bubbling up, and he didn’t really want to say them. He was in  _space_. He was  _thrilled_ , he was  _ecstatic_ , but the black had pressed so inexorably against the window. “It’s not like home.” he said eventually, and he didn’t look at Phil because it didn’t really matter who he was talking to, just that the words were falling out. He wasn’t even really sure he wanted to look up and see a stranger’s pity. “You can’t – you can’t walk out, go wherever you want. You’re stuck at the mercy of the crew and the milis and the ship’s so big but it’s all there is so it’s nowhere near big enough. And I miss people, I miss people I never thought I’d miss. I miss my brother and my gran and my whole A-level English class and the old lady across the street who had seven cats and collected tin cans out of everyone’s rubbish.” He hadn’t meant for his voice to break, but it did. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t regret it, except maybe I do.”

 

“C’mere.” Phil said softly, and Dan looked up at a gentle face and open arms. He wasn’t sure why Phil was offering, and he wasn’t sure why he wasn’t more reluctant to crawl the few feet that separated them. The smooth metal of the floor was slick under his knees, and he slid a centimeter forward and suddenly nothing was certain and he was swimming in a horrible vertigo. Floating in literal empty space – outside that goddamned picture window was literal empty space. Vacuum and a few spare hydrogen molecules. Literal fucking nothing.

And then he’d reached Phil and buried his face in Phil’s shoulder, and Phil’s arms were closing loosely around him, and he could sort of breathe again, because there was something here, something warm and human, and maybe Phil was entirely atoms and electrical pulses and the constructed human meaning was even worse than the nothing outside, but there was something comforting in his presence.

“Sorry,” Dan said again, trying to laugh through fast, ragged breaths. He had to bring his hands up to cling to Phil’s collar, and felt a little bad about it. He smelled sweet and dry, a late-summer day.

“S’nothing.”

“I wanna go home.” he whispered; Phil was silent. “Except sometimes I think I am home, except why am I here?”

Phil’s arms were cradling him to his chest. Two fragile, uprooted, too-human bodies. “I don’t know specifically, but you do, Dan, you made the choice hundreds of times before you got on this ship. But it’s an adventure, and it’s a journey, and we saw Saturn yesterday, and we’re passing Uranus’s orbit in a little bit, and don’t be sad about something this amazing.”

“Why are  _you_ here?”

There was a long pause, in which Phil’s hands fastened tighter around Dan’s arms like he was contemplating whether to grab on tighter or let go entirely, and Dan wondered what the etiquette was for asking about why you’d abandoned your homeworld and whether he should let it go and whether, in fact, he already knew. If Phil was that simple. That concrete. An adventure. To see the stars.

“I wanted to see everything.” Phil said, and maybe for him it was that easy. “But.”

He went silent, and a tiny jolt from the ship pushed them both sideways, and they both had to shove out an arm to catch themselves, and they didn’t gravitate back together. Dan moved backward a few inches. Sat cross-legged and watched Phil’s face.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t avoid, Phil, we’re stuck here together.”

“Honestly, it’s nothing. I just. There wasn’t much left for me on Earth, so I left.”

The chronometer let out a soft chime. 02:00. They’d be passing Uranus’s orbit soon, but Dan couldn’t think about it. About how far away they were. He got up and handed Phil’s blanket back over. Phil wasn’t meeting his eyes.

Dan sat back on his own bunk. Let his head fall back against the wall with a soft thump. Let Phil switch the light off. He wasn’t sure when he fell asleep.

* * *

It was over dinner the next evening – bland and reconstituted, no one quite used to the strange new lifestyle they’d found themselves in – that they crossed Neptune’s orbit. At some point, soaring past planets out of the solar system had become mundane. There was an announcement. Something to the effect of _we are now crossing the orbit of Neptune_  – of  _Neptune_ , they were that far away – and no one got up to go stare out the picture window and watch the unchanging black sky for some hint of Neptune’s existence, like it might have left a glowing golden bubble trail in its wake as it spun by months before.

They hit the first asteroid belts just after what would have been nightfall if they had been on Earth. The ship wobbled once or twice: a nearing-light-speed version of ducking out of the way. Once or twice, Dan watched asteroids spin past outside the window, just for a moment, and turned away before he could get sucked in.

“Fifteen hours.” Phil told him, looking unhappy about it, when Dan had arrived back at a14 from one of his brief seconds at the picture window.

“What?”

“We’re passing through the Kuiper belt. It takes fifteen hours to get through. I just looked it up on the schedule.”

Dan nodded.

“It’s going to get worse.” Phil said. “We’re just on the fringes, you know.”

“I’ll go look out, probably.” Dan said. It would be a mistake. It would send him spinning into a crisis like last night’s as surely as climbing down into the airlock would send him spinning out into freezing, crushing empty space. He smiled at Phil, who still looked troubled, because despite the fact they barely knew each other, Dan still felt closer to him than he’d felt about anyone in a long time.

He ended up leaning on the window and staring out like the empty black and pinpricks of alien gold held any kind of answer at all. The ship lurched; moments later, the rock swung by, blotting out the stars for half a second. He stayed there long enough to let the darkness creep into his soul and the vertigo settle deep in his stomach, and then he turned back to a14.

“ ‘s funny.” he said, leaning on the doorframe and trying to rebuild protection between himself and his psyche. “How far away from everything we are.”

Phil glanced up. “Why’s that funny?”

“I mean, it’s not.” He was trying to keep his voice light and mostly succeeding. “Don’t you ever think about it? There’s no reason for us to exist at home, but there’s even less reason for us to exist here. There’s nothing here. There’s not  _supposed_ to be anything here, except for the rocks.” As if on cue, the ship dipped again, twisted into a low rumble of movement. Phil turned away. “So – ”

“Shut up.” It was quiet.

“What?”

“ _Shut up_.”

Dan stopped. Actually looked at him. “You’re scared.”

“Shut up with your fucking existentialism, yes, I’m scared.”

There was silence. The ship was shaking, and Dan was suddenly glad everything was bolted to the floor. Phil was standing by the wall, one hand clutching at it for balance.

“Okay.” Dan said. “Um.” He stepped forward into the room; closed the door behind him. It was quiet except for the low murmur of the engines.

“It’s fine.” Phil said, and his smile was so convincing that Dan almost believed him. He couldn’t, though, not quite, and he forced himself across the room and tugged Phil down to sit on the floor. A half-familiar dance, a reenactment of the night before. Dan tossed his blanket over Phil’s legs and knelt down himself, touching the edge of it.

“This might be the roughest blanket I’ve ever touched.” Dan said, attempting to lighten the mood. Phil accepted the gambit.

“Yeah – let’s – as soon as we can save up the ration points let’s get a better one.”

“Sure,” Dan said, but only because Phil’s hands were shaking. He wasn’t opposed to roommate symbiosis, but it was only the second full day.

The ship jerked dramatically, flinging them both sideways. The doors to both the lockers clanged open, contents sliding across the floor, and Phil pressed his face into his knees and grabbed out for a handful of Dan’s sleeve.

“Sorry.” he said, muffled in his knees, and let go.

“ ‘s fine.” Dan said.

“Come here, please?”

And somehow Dan found himself next to Phil with Phil’s head pillowed on his shoulder, before he could even think of a way to say no.

“They never told me space was about cuddling with mostly-strangers.” Dan said eventually. The shocks were steady now, spaced minutes apart, smaller debris crackling along the hull in between.

“Maybe space is about meeting strangers and making them not-strangers.” Phil told him. “I think we’ve reached a point where we’ve become not-strangers, Dan.”

“All right, then. If you insist.”

“Maybe in fifteen months we’ll even be friends.”

Dan laughed. “I think we could manage that.”

They stayed like that for a long time.


End file.
